When Frustration Turns Into Art - Words vs Numbers

3 Nov 2018

It's been a while since I've blogged or even had the chance to build something, so last weekend when I was busy trying to get something to work, I was thwarted by a failure of an ESP8266 Wi-Fi Shield that was so elusive that derailed my plans entirely and resulted in butchering a few components.

However, out of the ashes of testing the components that remained, rose a little consolation prize built from scraps and half-broken bits. Something built for the "sake" of building it. Something I'd probably call "art".

It uses an HD44780-based display to show an ongoing battle between words versus numbers, but more than that, is a demonstration of (pseudo) "random" behaviour and entropy/decay. But more than that, it's just rather interesting to watch the words appear for a fleeting moment, with a challenge of "catching" them before they disappear.

I posted about the full journey at my own personal blog - https://goughlui.com/2018/11/03/project-words-vs-numbers-art-with-an-arduino-hd44780-lcd/

Hope you enjoy the posting, and feel free to "look around".

Of course, it's not always perfect - for example, I ran into issues with Arduino's pointer implementation which results in sketches >64kB having trouble (hence limiting the number of words in the sketch to ~6500) - apparently there are ways to get around this to some extent with segmenting the storage and using "far pointers", but this is hardly well documented. Maybe I'll learn this eventually ... or maybe I'll just stick to more powerful 32-bit platforms and forget about it entirely .

- Gough

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14rhb over 7 years ago

Hi Gough,

This is different - and interestingly so - thanks for sharing.

I'm finding I'm mesmerised into watching it much longer that I probably need to

Rod
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Gough Lui over 7 years ago in reply to 14rhb

Thanks for the encouragement ... my last "arty" project would have been this one from 2015:
http://goughlui.com/2015/05/22/project-a-fluorescent-starter-based-glow-lamp/
I guess as a "young bloke" who never had any memories of "warm glow" from tubes, this was the closest I got .
Been staring at this each night for years - but with all the sputtering of the bimetallic strips, it's gotten a lot dimmer with the metallic deposits on the inside of the glass envelope. Luckily, it's not hard to grab a few more fluorescent tube starters to run (after the RFI suppression capacitor has been cut out).

- Gough
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Gough Lui over 7 years ago in reply to 14rhb

Thanks for the encouragement ... my last "arty" project would have been this one from 2015:
http://goughlui.com/2015/05/22/project-a-fluorescent-starter-based-glow-lamp/
I guess as a "young bloke" who never had any memories of "warm glow" from tubes, this was the closest I got .
Been staring at this each night for years - but with all the sputtering of the bimetallic strips, it's gotten a lot dimmer with the metallic deposits on the inside of the glass envelope. Luckily, it's not hard to grab a few more fluorescent tube starters to run (after the RFI suppression capacitor has been cut out).

- Gough
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14rhb over 7 years ago in reply to Gough Lui

Another great project - for some reason (unknown to me) I've never opened up a tube starter.

Rod
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